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What is the funniest image that comes to mind with two words or less?
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The Painter, George W. Bush
For seven days I was off the grid. Actually I was paying by the minute to the lovely Holland America people trying to get on the grid while work-cruising with 4,400 Ladies of Olivia on their 40th anniversary sea bash. Whenever I did manage to check my email, I didn’t have the minutes to check my bookmarked news sites and to unsubscribe to the great deal on penis enlargers. Spam floats.
Now land-based and in a fugue state of let-down from so much fun, I have been catching up on news I missed. The ship’s daily, condensed New York Times bulletin did not see fit to cover the story of hackers who broke into the Bush family email account. Perhaps they dismissed the hacker’s aspirations sunk to new lows since Julian Assange, as if they were not hackers, but merely hacks.
I agree, but thank them nonetheless for the insight into the so-called mind of George W. Bush who has taken up painting in his retirement. Sadly it is not a jail-time perk for good behavior, but a hobby freely practiced.
Listen, I applaud anyone who develops new interests in retirement, or even anyone who can retire, and I do not criticize his skill. I probably won’t be a great fly-girl dancer when I first retire, but I’ll keep at it. He has been seen on the bluffs at the family compound off the coast of Maine squinting into the sun and daubing at his gesso. W proudly shared two paintings with his sister via email. After seeing them, I just wonder what he was looking at.
One portrait is of him standing bare, muscled back, shaving and looking at himself in a small, steamed, oval vanity mirror above the sink. The other self-portrait is of W in the bathtub. In the long perspective he is Narcissus looking at his legs underwater down to his feet on either side of the faucet. There is no suggestion of any hand-holding with Laura in a ciallis-type companion tub next to his.
Everywhere he looks, he sees himself, serene in simple daily tasks. Invulnerable in that most personal of spaces, the bath. He is a man at peace with himself, free, proud to reveal himself via a pre-twitter primness. Comfortable in his exposed skin. He paints himself looking at his body, full and vital not scarred or severed as so many vets see every morning in their mirrors.
You have had a few more days than I to examine W’s works but I am freshly staggered by what they say and don’t say. I am sure he intended none of it. It is paint by numbers introspection. His work is primitive like Grandma Moses. If she were a war criminal and simpleton.
OMG
Pope Benedict has announced he will retire on Feb. 28, 2013.
When a CEO of a major multinational quits and gives just two weeks’ notice, everybody pricks up their ears. Those who can hear through the deafening and tasteless “Ding dong the witch is dead,” remix are wondering why the sudden papal exit? Did the butler do it? Was it the Nuns on the Bus? Was it something unseemly on his Twitter account? Was it the continuing revelations that something is rotten in the city of Los Angeles besides the Lakers? Was it the Grammys?
The Pope said he’s “justus plumbius tuckered outum”. Hillary is tired too, but I hope she’ll rest up and be back. My concern is that there are plenty of young Tea Party cardinal types all lined up and eager to continue the anti-woman, anti-gay ultra-orthodox drive toward purity that this retiring pope, always God’s Rottweiler, has sic’d on the Catholic Church. The young ones think the Pope wasn’t strict enough. They hate the sinner and the sin.
So let me say, if nominated I will not run. Lord knows I would give anything to hear NPR’s smoky-voiced correspondent from Rome, Sylvia Polgoli speak my name until the cardinals come home, but I am not tempted. Pride is still a major sin in my Pre-Vatican II playbook. And you know Donald Trump is considering throwing his hair in the ring.